Trax NYC Jewelers: Young Atlas Interview With Owner

thanks for sitting down with us appreciate it so let's just jump right into it can you tell us a little bit about Trax NYC how you got started sure I see how I got started when I turned 18 it was my birthday I collected my birthday money and I got 1,500 bucks 1,800 bucks together and I bought a digital camera and I headed downtown to Canal Street to start taking pictures of jewelry putting it up on ebay from a store that I found ok the one over the course of the summer after I graduated high school I found this little jewelry store they let me do that started photographing it didn't know anything about jewelry business didn't know anybody in it but I got my foot through the door and I kept pushing through it yeah gotcha so when when you were starting that it was just you you were just taking photos and then you were selling them on eBay that's so good bought it sent it gotcha gotcha I love it where did you have always have this entrepreneurial spirit within you before you were a good student don't really pay attention in class or whatever the teachers are taught they were talking about whatever the hell was going on in there and you write you that I need to make money okay and you know it's a big city got a lot going on it's plenty opportunities ecommerce is coming up I mean I did the math and I went for it gotcha I love it where did you all grow up beforehand I was born in Baku Azerbaijan this is the Middle East okay north of Iran south of Russia and then I came here in 94 I believe when I was seven years old okay gotcha so you started this taking pictures and then when did you you know create the brick and mortar shop how did that I mean 15 years in the making okay you know what I'm saying so a year later I incorporated the company I got the corporation I got my first office which was like 450 a month and it was really tough but I stuck with it then I got my second office my third office working with different vendors you get a showroom built a showroom and then the store came like two years ago gotcha so you've been here for two years well the story is yeah this store physically we're in right now so it's been a struggle and yeah and a lot of interview a lot of entrepreneurs and I watch a lot of and like interviews obviously but it's what our you know those tough years are very important because it's like those are that's the make-or-break time so what were some of the things that kind of kept you motivated to keep working and keep going well you know it was like you just had some more options to exhaust that's really what it is I wouldn't want to you know turn back on my quest of building a business and building e-commerce business and when there was another avenue to go down or another door to look behind to I would just do it or just keep doing it right you know it was like a game of chess until it's checkmate you play mm-hmm you know you know even if the moves are somewhat desperate and you can move pieces somewhere somehow to try to maneuver around you keep maneuvering gotcha you know if you get closed in and you're in a checkmate then you can't play anymore but I never got to that point and there was many many challenges over the course of 15 years but never get to that checkmate kept playing the game of course and I feel like about resilience that's a huge characteristic and being an entrepreneur right you have that no matter what attitude listen I mean you embark upon this journey you embark upon this journey it's not for everybody there's a lot of different people with certain mentalities that are never gonna make it because their mentality is very primitive very weak you know they don't want to take about the challenge they don't to deal with the problems they want to sit there and feed dopamine to their own brain by saying hey next year I'm gonna be in a jet or next year or this or that or I could do this and they think about the fun things of business you know the type of business car the type of fliers or the type of this type of that that's not the way it works it's nobody where reality works you got to deal with a variety of different complicated problems that are gonna burden your mind and they're gonna cut off your happiness all right cut off your flow of dopamine cut off your you know your enjoyment of life and if you can't deal with that then you're not gonna be able to make it because there's many many aspects where you're having to deal with fraud or deal with people or lose friends or deal with manufacturers it will complicate problems now listen it's a problem that has a solution but you're not going to be happy you're not gonna be thrilled while you're dealing with it yeah if you're the type of personality and wants to go and get high or chill out somewhere you know because you have you're dealing with stress then you're not gonna make it yeah you got to dive into this and you got to deal with it and that's the bars high right and there's definitely a lot of stress obviously in the jewelry business right so what are some of those specifically just some some annoying things that cuz I want this to be a real interview I want someone who's watching this to get out of it you know these are some of the things the difficulties and being a jeweler because you know they see all the flash there's a lot of work that's one of the issues I mean people are looking at the perspective or the mentality of the average person is extremely low especially in this industry you know you're not there you're dealing with doctors or something like that in some cases you are and you're getting intelligent people you get in the business people another factor is you're dealing with extremely primitive minds you know I got a piece and a bus down there did it did it did what I'm saying and that's that works for certain rappers that have money to burn but that's not a mentality that I can handle you know because I'm thinking in business my mind is business discipline to grow business and you're dealing with with some state of mind that that isn't intelligent that's one of the reasons why I work on the gold and I want to talk about investment and you know trying to convince people to making a sound jewelry purchase because I can't really deal with the with some of the mentality of the of the people out there especially the ones that just follow the rapper's uh he's got this he's got that so but that's not the the main the main frustration that's my current frustration main frustration is fraud it's a lot of fraud employees that steal you know you have somebody working for you for five years that you train that's making money and you find out they're stealing what do you do do you fire them or do you get them arrested you're losing sales volume what about everything invested in them who's gonna replace their complicated task to deal with you know or PayPal or credit card transactions their fraudulent you know I'm saying you get to the transactions all the time from scam artists what do you do with that your credit card processors you're looking at you one day the bank is looking at you another day somebody buys a watch twenty thousand dollars then they want to return it so on and so forth some other jeweler told them something someone a song is hundreds of them there's hundreds different points of frustration the biggest ones being the economy you know the economy collapsed in 2009 so if you're a business owner or you're a business person there then you're starting your business now it's extremely difficult I wouldn't have been able to get my this business off the ground if I'm starting in 2017 or 2019 when this post Great Recession economy than right now where the money is not really flowing and no one really has money for jewelry to begin with and you're dealing with the market swings the market changes there's so many points of frustration you have to like you said you have to be very resilient to survive and what you were talking about in terms of the investing and gold I know you I was on your page and there's a lot of value and a lot of things I've learned from it you can you talk a little bit more about you know the specifics of what that investment is educate our viewers yeah sure I mean over the past six thousand years you know gold has been around that's as far as reported civilization around before that the thing about gold is that if all the gold in the world was evenly divided amongst every person alive every person will get about 26 grams now certain banks have tons of gold stored so that already reduces the amount that everybody could share that saw like two and a half grams so if you're wearing a kilo chain you're really wearing someone else's gold all right now gold supply is limited that's the bottom line and it's limited so there's not enough for everybody so to speak all right let's say we're having a pizza party with twenty people and all I got is one pie that has eight slices you know I'm saying we got to decide upon who's getting the slices and who's getting a little bit of crust and whose is the important people so to speak are getting the best of it and that's how gold works it goes to people who have more resources who have more power they're the ones that hold the gold the people that don't have that power don't have those resources when they have the gold they know that they can switch it and trade it for something with people that have surpluses all right that that's why gold turns into money all right it floats to the rich and the powerful or vacuum-cleaning it so now if you have a little bit of it you could bring it to someplace where you could get something out of it in return right all right whatever surplus is that they have and that fuels this mass desire for gold for the it's a long story short for the practical person all right Gold is a great form of savings for if you're doing long term savings okay if a person is making $1,000 a week or something like that a large portion of everything they save or or what they make a certain portion has to be saved forever if you're a intelligent person okay that doesn't blow their money all right that's why I'm a hard time communicating with the mentality it's like oh he got the did it did it did it it whatever you know I'm saying if that's the if that's the mentality I like to serve my customers on a different mentality okay I don't want to serve my customers a big piece that spins and you get ripped off and then six years later you're trying to get tenth of your value out of it that's not how I do business detection in this particular case you know a gold owner is a lifetime investor so you start working and you start employing if you see if your first job is an 18 19 20 years old you're making $1,000 a week of $500 a week whatever it is a portion of it has to be saved per month you took for the rest of your life never to be spent it has to transform into different values but never to be spent okay so if the course of 19 years old or 20 years old and you're saving that you may be saving five grams of gold a month 10 grams of gold a month that gold over a course of time is gonna appreciate in value so let's say in the in the first five years of your employment you save about just the meager hundred grams of pure gold okay over the course of that life if you if everybody did that over a course of time they would look back and they would see that if they spent let's say let's say they started doing that today and it was about four thousand dollars over the course of you know two years that they saved up you know it's hard to say when you're new yo right you know that four thousand dollars by the time that they're 35 would probably be around ten thousand twelve thousand dollars right okay thirteen thousand dollars so it would be setting them safe saving up for property all right if you start out with nothing like I started I invest in gold personally but I invest in marketing more I'm on a different level I'm playing a different game and if you're living a straightforward life and you're not saving money you're just going in a circle you're not gonna have anything your whole life you know ultimate goal of an average person is to be able to own their own home or own their own apartments I don't have to pay rent so they could retire comfortably right and the best way to do that is by means of gold and having gold savings over a course of time and that could be in the form of go owning gold chains or gold jewellery and so on and so forth right I sell diamond jewelry too I directly tell people diamond jewelry is a luxury item for people who were rich and I'm saying if you're rich and you want to show it then you get yourself a fully ice piece and fully ice it's like a wrapper does if you not that pretending that to be that is a mistake right because you can invest it wisely yeah you could invest it wisely you know I'm saying you could buy Gucci shoes like somebody bought Balenciaga shoes for $900 okay you know they could look rich at some party somewhere somehow I don't understand that mentality you know I'm saying I'm not gonna do that if you want to get nice shoes get nice shoes but make sure that your suppor ssin of your money is still being saved and you cannot save it in currency anymore you can't save it in the bank that's a sucker's way of saving it the the inflation of outstrip your savings if you're saving $10,000 over the course of 10 years then you're going backwards because that $10,000 is not gonna have the same spending power over 10 years right right I gotcha you know so these are complicated things but they're ultimately for adults to understand and for people who are conscious of having a quality of life over a course of time you know we have a culture where people are looking into wrappers for direction and you got wrappers and a blow on $200,000 on a piece and then they wrap it about how they're on drugs that works for them that's gonna work for 20 people out of 10 million yeah you know the rest of them are gonna play themselves doing that but it's such an easy lifestyle that the fact it's like it lures a person in that the fact that some people are popping pills or doing that and getting everything in life and getting a Ferrari out of it that makes sense for them and that works and if you could be one of those people go for it but the rest of the people they have to have some sense and you can still shine you can still have something you can have nice things but you got to do it the right way and that's what I tell my customers so we were talking about some different investments and from you know the average person good for savings is gold for the business person like yourself you invest into marketing into growing your business what are some things let's dive into that a little specifics the tough one it's a tough one to work out what basically works like this you want to be able to invest in marketing and get a return on your investment okay so you know let's say if you could put $100,000 into a marketing campaign and get a hundred one thousand dollars out could you do it should you do it under what circumstances all right it's very very complicated to be honest for instance you know Facebook and Instagram I was able to build a brand to build a campaign out there by doing that I was putting in a hundred thousand dollars over the course of three months and getting back maybe eighty five thousand eighty four thousand but at the end of the day at the end of that campaign I would have a residual amount of growth and followers and growth and presence right then I would have to go through that cycle again and maybe this time I'll get back ninety thousand out of a hundred then I would get back a hundred out of a hundred and a hundred and five so if you learn how to play that game it's a numbers game you can build and develop a brand but that all depends it's very tough again you know I did in the jewelry business there's a lot of people want to sell sunglasses or they want to make this so they want to make a clothing line and so on and so forth and how are they gonna make that happen if you know they want to advertise and market their business they don't have a lot of resources so they're gonna put in two three hundred dollars and if they don't get that money back you know and they're starting up with a t-shirt startup or something like that then they're in trouble that's when you have to be extremely strategic you have to get the best selling iron of some funny t-shirt that does so well that's where the brain comes into yeah into play where you know it's a filter you know you shall not pass unless you have this type of intellect you start the business you're good at it you might have some great ideas but then you want to market the business you want to grow it if you market the wrong product your business is strangled before it even got started right if you market the right product then you're gonna be able to spend 200 and you see you get a couple of dollars back 300 back and then you could try again and you can keep growing and you find out what your sellers are what your good pieces are so on and so forth with no experience and especially with the market the economy the way it is it's extremely difficult you got to be very very careful you know that's why so many people have pigeon-holed into having a regular job they want to start a business start a market we could get lucky you could be a creative work influencers give them a portion of the business then you have to deal with people who are doing the right thing doing the wrong thing so on and so forth so that's that me I spent about a couple of million dollars advertising this business doctrine when I was only able to do and have a couple of million dollars I had 1500 when I started right I was able to do it a thousand two thousand at a time get an ROI do this do that and it's only because I have a knack for understanding these complicated equations and these complicated transactions when I have to market a business to get a return on the investment actually if I wasn't able to do that or I wasn't able to fight that learning curve business will get strangled out gotcha so that's as appreciated because that's important for people to understand that those and you're not always winning when you're marketing but like you said the residuals can eventually get you into the positive with it you know the way you wanna the way you want to do that is the way you want to market a business is to be in a business where there's very little competition okay because and that's tough to find all right that's extremely tough to find because if you're in a very highly competitive business there's a lot of advertisers already in there and you have to put your dollars up against there's a certain place a certain time you got to find a way to to to compete in a place that doesn't have that many people attacking it you know those types of businesses clothing watches jewelry all the stuff shoes whatever it's very very competitive it's a whole plethora of people trying to make it you have to have a serious competitive edge or else you're never gonna have nothing right and that is the fundamental aspect of it you know maybe some businesses that don't have a lot of competition that might do better than others I wish I could name what they are but again if I knew what they were you know I would be in them in terms of your day to day like what do you spend most of your time on and in growing your business right now what's been most successful is my what's been most successful is my marketing of my videos that I do my individual videos that you know get three hundred eighty four thousand views for 2,000 views 700,000 views that's just uh so basically let's look how I did that all right I spent millions of dollars marketing my website developing um an audience and I was able to figure out after years of experimenting how to get in front of that audience and how to entertain them and how to get into the explore page or so on and so forth to get into a lot of people's minds that was a very long process I didn't just wake up learning how to do that I had to learn it I'm gonna teach it pretty fast right but learning it from nothing and we're no one's telling you any secrets about anything it's very very difficult and I got myself into that position so now I'm in a space where I could market my business based upon tying in history science and into jewelry and economics and marketing my business where I can entertain a person about a piece of jewelry gotcha that's where my head is so adding adding that value and that educational component yeah I mean simplifying it and saying in simple terms I got to make videos that go viral every day right and not every day at least twice a week let's talk but I'm up for the challenge right and ice so I see you're really breaking down the different things you do every day and we're on this block obviously in the diamond district and there's so many Julia jewelers here so it must be very competitive like what are some things that like separate the you know good jewelers from the great ones um luck is a big deal I mean you gotta have a lot of tenacity to to hold on to this business but then when you get a certain big client to walk through the door like a piane a future that springboards into so many other clients that you know you if you hold on and you hold your business and you have the right items the right jewelry that's a total separate part and then eventually something comes up that it's a big opportunity that lets you expand so it's kind of like you know you're walking up that staircase waiting for that elevator to take you up to the you know and there could be a big client somebody comes through the door and something happens that makes a makes a difference so if you hold on and you develop your business long enough has that have you had any luck like that with you know I've seen you work with celebrities all the time with some big clients that has really helped helped you out with your brand I have but I've made my own luck so to speak right saying the way market is my business with the Takashi you know how I used in to springboard into other things and other celebrities have helped me in certain ways but celebrities you know um are difficult to work with you know different ones have different psychological issues that I don't you know I don't want to deal with at this point in time in my business career I want to develop a business where I can put products organize it build a brand clients come they deal with sales and service sales and service closes transaction we get them the product product gets manufactured doesn't have me having to go to a celebrity you know III this and that and all want a piece like this and it's all a bunch of I don't have time for that I don't have that type of energy you know I can't dumb myself somebody like I don't want to name who but some they come over here and then be like I want to fully ice Miami Cuban better than another dead of that I'm like yeah you know Mia I want to sell them a product that's useful that's correct and you know I don't want to explain to them I'll say what do you need a diamond Miami Cuba for you should just get this as a better investment piece but their mentality is not like that the mentality is is that I got a Cuban bust it down and then it it with all the slang and that's fine that's fine if you want to beat twenty years from now you know like like a jar rule or this and that what a stainless steel chain after everything is gone yeah I don't know you want that or not you don't have the sense to look ten years in the future fifteen years in your future they get the out of here I I hear you and I think one of the reasons you know the a lot of these people you work with they came into that success really quick right overnight and you've been building a business here for fifteen years so you know it's completely two dynamics yeah it's hard for me I'd rather have some salesperson deal with it right with them it's hard for me to deal with that mentality I can't get on it okay I don't want to get on it I rather go the course that I'm going where she where we're educating the consumer and having them a purchase that's gonna work out for them in the end that's the course I'm taking doctrine that's not the pill-popping course but that's fine that works for some people that's what the kids want to see that's what they want to hear and you know listen that's the world we live in right but I'm gonna play my niche is there any other jewelers in the game that you know you look kind of look up to respect the way they do business oh yeah there's a lot of compare competitor Jews I don't look up to them particularly because this is not the type of business where you look up to someone yeah you know you're competing and so the people that I've seen successful people I respect what they do I respect their jewelry mmm I respect their hustle and you know that their tactics are different from mine but that's the nature of the business gotcha what would you give if if you were going back and you had to give some advice to you know someone trying to start off in the jewelry game what is something you maybe advise them to do first starting on you know if I took a time machine it went back a time you know the advice I'd give myself would be to a trust my instinct because my instincts were saying one thing and other people and all the factors are saying a different thing all right and I was very hesitant on things that I could have went full force on listing my first couple of items and so on and so forth is it gonna sell yeah it is gonna sell get it listed and get going you know I'm saying there's a buyer in a marketplace for it right but you know it's you know it's a matter of trusting your instincts and doing the math doing the scientific experimentation to determine your course of business it's all about analyzing a situation coming I would attack that coming up with a strategy doing the math doing the science doing the experimentation to find out what works what doesn't where things have to be quantified get going on that as soon as possible and you're gonna be able to develop a functioning business Amazon and so on and so forth is all it was all developed and these bigger business and all developed on you know fundamental principles they start out with books and they're like oh this is a best-seller these are selling well let's branch into from books to whatever held and the Kindle then this than that and you grow a business strategically than you before you know you sell paper towels and your sales volume is however many billion concert that's done strategically that's not done what I think or someone told me but you said this you said that it's very difficult this a plethora of advice you know but you have to the fundamental advice is you have to think realistically and quantified you have to be a good judge of character who you're doing business with and how focus on that and you know avoid our all the noise to be serious about your business dhanno patrick don't get distracted and don't get delusional with with certain prospects and that's tough that's tough as hell but you gotta stick with it you got an experiment and continue on you know what a variety of different factors just to go on into uh you know you you're involved in so many different things just from the jewelry level like what is you know just can you take us through maybe what a day's usually like for you like how how it goes down let's say today today I said tonight on Monday yeah I'm looking around I'm checking the numbers getting a feel of how busy or how slow it is in different departments I'll look at them on the marketing campaign and then I'll brainstorm a video on a commercial maybe employ a new product or to do a different type of commercial or to hire some people or just strategize with somebody right I appreciate that and you um you're not just located here you have some other branches yeah yeah we have some serious customers you meet a lot of interesting people in this business and we set up our tracks Tokyo from a customer that was great attracts Northwest and we're doing the tracks Paris ooh nice is it just are you the sole owner of tracks how does that well I'm tracks yeah so that should say something there as I subtract my C which is mine Oh what I give to get a foothold in different places I give divisions to people I see that they are worthwhile to do business with we're just gonna jump in a little bit into the pieces just to get an idea of what you like do you I see you wearing a bus down today do you like the bus now more than the plain-jane jewelers have some jewelry watch or whatever and you know I I like to make it and I like the way it looks I like the attention that I get or I like the way you know works and the Sun hits it and so on and so forth so my mom you know I like to wear fully ice pieces I don't have as many as I would because I got a stocking store yeah I don't have that much money to do do that with all right you know like I said I mean you know diamond pieces and all that's beautiful that's a lot of fun if you have the money for right but if you have a choice between investing in more gold based jewelry or not that it all depends on how smart or how dumb you are you know I'm saying we'll make a piece and then it's like why do you get a comment anything fully ice uh-uh-uh-uh-uh usually a person who got 15 bucks to their name and they're saving up for whatever you know for nothing and they think you their money goes just disappears because as soon as they get it they go to the Gucci store that usually is the case because their self-esteem is so low that they have to mimic what other people look like they're not thinking for themselves because they think too little of themselves they're the ones that are leaving the comment like this is fully that's not fully I Easter leaving a hateful comment they have a they're not aware of their complex but they have a complex and they're not making that they're the ones that when they're gonna have money they're gonna blow it all away I did you know that's not the advice I would give that person I'm not sitting there bullshitting and telling ya get yourself a fully bust down started ah I'm telling them yet this is if you're rich if you have $100,000 to your name and you've already invested 70 and you want to get yourself a fully ice watch at the right price and then you know still hold some of its value go for it but if you've just made $30,000 for the first time in your life get yourself something's gonna be worth money don't go and get yourself a fully ice Rolex with your last dollar and they walk out on our jewelry store with nothing yeah don't do that but some customers are so stupid that it's not the right thing to tell them because they're too dumb to figure that out on their own you gotta tell ya I got you here's your fully ice I can't do that I get south sales people that I can only tell somebody the truth alright I can't do that for anybody else seeing it happening yourself that's crazy so last thing I wanted to just you know talk to you a little bit about was just some plans for the future you know you know you're expanding and once first of all congrats on your success and I appreciate the time so yeah what are some goals that you have for you know 2019 2019 well I mean so the goals always the same increased sales increased reach and all that other stuff but I'm doing a lot with gold and I'm doing a lot with educating and I'm there's a lot of people that are watching it it's you know football players a DM and actresses this that so on and so forth a lot of people are watching it okay and it's influencing it so you know mine idea is to go through the camera lens dive inside that camera lens and grab their mind with my with with the things I say alright just grip it and not let it go you know I'm saying drag them into my direction and into into my influence gotcha and lastly any advice for someone that's you know I know you said it earlier but just to reiterate a little bit you're trying to start a business in 2019 what is some advice you would give some of these young entrepreneurs watching this is very important I mean you got a test of waters scientifically if you don't know what that is and start to do any research all right because you want to be able to conduct scientific experiments in order to grow your business you want to be able to launch a product line and you have to have a logical analytical mind to do so and you know it's a shame because some people have very artistic minds they could create beautiful clothing beautiful this beautiful that but they don't have the enough an analytical mind to bring it to the marketplace properly you have to have two sides of your brain functioning the analytical mind which is over here analyzes the numbers and the statistics and thing and the creative mind which creates graphics and art and so on and so forth those two have to communicate with one another so you have to have your mentality correct all right you know you can't be some dreamer okay you can't sit there and feed your mind dopamine I was doing with some I took some people out to dinner some young up-and-coming rappers he's like in the middle of the dinner he's like oh yeah next year I'm gonna be taking you out on my jet i'ma do some of that what do you tell what are you talking to yourself about what are you what are you deluding yourself about what you're gonna have you don't have you don't have when I didn't have nothing I took the opposite of what I thought little of myself I should have higher gave myself to benefited it out and built my business because I could have built it and I spent a long time hesitating but that hesitation was far better than taking a leak that's gonna crash into a brick wall and you got to realize the mind tricks itself to feed itself it tells itself things to give itself dopamine if you want to feel good and be happy all the time it's gonna be very difficult to deal with the challenges and the setbacks of business you got to wake up in the morning and get ready to get a setback challenges that seem impossible and then have to sit there and figure out how to solve them anyway and be very very careful and it's a it's a mental game you're fighting yourself and at the end of the day if you're an entrepreneur whether you're doing jewelry or you're doing interviews or you're doing this and that you do this and that if you want to be successful the person that starting the journey is never gonna finish it the person that's gonna finish it ain't gonna be the same the one started you're gonna transform into a different person the kid that you know bought a digital camera went down the Canal Street is gone the dead psychologically physically all my new rocks have been folded over and under themselves to create a different person in the same body but the kid is only the fundamentals are live and Who I am now is transformed human being because I had to go through a certain filter of reality to conquer a very competitive business and that can happen to certain degrees depending on the competition that you're dealing with you know but this business transformed me into a realistic thinker and you got to prepare yourself for that transformation that's amazing I'm ready to grind right now now seriously thank you for the time and this was great very insightful appreciate you dropping these gems for us appreciate you guys coming through and then I come back any time let's do business any time of course you

Channel: Young Atlas

Views: 119,848

Rating: 4.8029118 out of 5

Keywords: Jewelry, Entrepreneur, Small Business, Hip Hop, NYC, Interview, Custom Jewelry, Gold, Diamonds, Watches, Precious Metals, Rings, Necklaces, Jewelry Investment, Silver, Platinum, Investment, Savings, Bullion, Diamond District

Id: b9P_chb9kvo

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019